Traveling the Clinical Diagnostic Lab Path

By Kay Townsend

Creating project alignment early on – well before formal design begins – promotes true engagement of all stakeholders and ensures that all vital questions relating to user needs are being asked and answered before the scope of the potential project is defined and designed. Leaning into lean design principles to validate current processes and to inform and improve the future state is the best way for users and designers to travel this path together.

Collaborative design necessitates engagement and education from those who work in the space every day. Site visits and workshops to observe firsthand how users perform their tasks under current conditions – in their existing environment – sheds valuable light on processes, people, and needs. Without this investment of time and interaction early on, any design work yet to come risks the possibility of being incomplete or of making assumptions that are at best inaccurate and at worst flawed and presumptive.

Extending the useful life of automated lines while designing, building and preparing new ones to take their place is a chief concern and priority held by clinical diagnostic lab owners and operators. The lines’ complexities challenge designers, owners, and end-users to walk through every inch of the process to emulate the path the various samples travels. Bringing lab designers, managers, and users together early on in sit-downs, walk-throughs, and process-centric discussions to clearly identify sense-of-place needs well before conceptual design and construction plans commence can spell the difference as to whether the end product – the redesigned lab space – truly improves productivity and turnaround time.